It was 69 years ago today, March 28, 1941, that Virginia Woolf left behind Leonard, Monk’s House, and two suicide notes and walked across the Sussex Downs.
With stones weighing down her coat pockets, she waded into the River Ouse and drowned.
In memoriam, we repeat the last line of the memorial poem Vita Sackville-West wrote in tribute to Woolf, which was published in The Observer in April of 1941. It contains more truth than Sackville-West could have imagined.
“She now has gone/Into the prouder world of immortality,” Sackville-West wrote.
For a touching video that pays homage to what Woolf accomplished during her life — and what she could have accomplished if she had lived on — watch “The Adventures of Virginia Woolf” on You Tube.
For an earlier memoriam to Woolf, click here. You can also read the Associated Press “Today in History,” which mentions Woolf.
Or read more about the response of her contemporaries to her untimely death in the 2005 book, Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, edited by Sybil Oldfield, and in the post below, ” Bloomsbury archives newly open to public.”
Editor’s Note: This was originally posted on March 28, 2008. I have included new information and am reposting it today in Woolf’s honor.
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